“Higher Education Leadership in a changing landscape: A perspective on the role of women leaders in higher education”
by
Lidia Brito
INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES and HIGHER EDUCATION LEADERSHIP: WHERE ARE THE WOMEN?
University of Cape Town, 27th March 2008

Distinguished participants,
Dear colleagues and friends,
Ladies and gentlemen

It is a great honor to be here, where I have the privilege to address such a distinguished assembly of African scholars, in this great African University, the University of Cape Town. My sincere gratitude to the organizers for the invitation and arrangements made for my participation.

I had to think “hard” what kind of speech I wanted to make in order to convey my message on this very challenging topic on “Institutional culture and higher education leadership”.

I could give you statistics and names and forward recommendations based on my analysis of that information.  

However, because my deep love for Higher Education, my believe that we, in Higher Education, have a crucial role to play for the development of our countries, people and continent, due to my strong conviction that we need to reflect on our leadership style and skills to change our institutional culture in order to increase our impact in society, I decided that I wanted and could speak to you from the heart. 

Therefore, I will address the topic of this conference from the perspective of Higher Education Leadership in a changing landscape and the role of women leaders in helping our institutions to face the challenges ahead.

Clearly, the challenges we face today are somewhat different, but not less complex from the challenges faced by our forefathers through out our history.

If in the past, the strength of our people was crucial for success, today, more then ever, we have to consolidate our unity, we have to develop our innovative, intuitive and systemic capacities and together build the prosperous continent we all aspire.

Today, more then ever, we are facing challenges that require a transformation of mentalities, behaviors and lifestyles. That transformation can only occur if we have a critical view on our own competencies,  acquiring, in this way, a new perception of the world we live in and gain space to act in that world. This new way of looking at one-self will strengthen our cultures and building our identity to achieve a better livelihood for all Africans. This new notion of competencies has to be part of education for all, so that every single African citizen has the capacity to participate in the choice of the best path for a sustainable development of our continent.

• Dear Participants,
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• Sustainable development means that we need to embrace the values, behaviors and lifestyles required for a sustainable future (UNESCO ESD 2004), which means to develop a common vision, and to have the ability and competencies to express that vision into reality. These competencies are clearly a new challenge to Education and Science, and therefore to us, HE institutions.
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For it requires building scientific and technical skills and at the same time develop the social support to apply them. It is about building up conviction and commitment to pursue sustainable development; it is about using diversity to sustain growth so that we build the passion to reinvent the dream continuously. That is why women's rights and women's essential role in development has been recognized and reaffirmed in the United Nations Plans of Action on the Environment and Development in 1992, on Human Rights in 1993, on Population and Development in 1994 and on Social Development in 1995 (Protocol to the African Chapter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, Maputo 2003).

It is also why the Protocol to the African Chapter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa determines, in its Article 19, that States have to ensure participation of women at all levels in the conceptualisation, decision-making, implementation and evaluation of development policies and programmes;

• Dear participants
•  
• As stated beautifully in the UNESCO Strategy for ESD, education is the primary agent of transformation towards sustainable development. Education is a process of learning how to make decisions, and in this particular case we have to learn how to make decisions about the long‑term future of the economy, ecology and equity of all communities in our Continent.
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• Education is definitely the starting point for this social transformation!
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• Women are educationists due to the different roles they play in the family and in our society.  Their involvement in this transformation as occurred, mostly, on the social sphere, but their involvement needs to be brought to the institutional/professional sphere because the competencies they bring are crucial for the decision making that affects this transformation process.
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Furthermore, this new vision of education places many challenges and pressures to Higher Education, and we need that diversity to address them. Allow me, therefore, to make these challenges a starting point of my concern about the low representation of female academics in leadership positions in our institutions and also the basis to recommend actions to increase women’s participation in Higher Education.

Higher Education has a fundamental role to play in the sustainable development of our Nations:

• We train the teachers for all levels of education;
• We train politicians that have to be honest, visionaries, capable of leading the people towards sustainable development;
• We train entrepreneurs that need to be socially responsible, politically aware and innovative;
• We conduct research that proposes alternative solutions and new lifestyles;
• We build the bridge between local and global knowledge.

University education cannot be a traditional vertical relationship between a master who speaks and an apprentice who listens.

Higher Education should be a constant iterative process of learning where we are all learners and it requires, clearly, a commitment towards seeking of truth, combined with an openness, participation, anticipation and innovation. It also requires combining universalism with cultural identity and rationalism with imagination, and objectiveness and distance with passion and compassion.

It requires that the University understands that it does not work alone, but is part of a bigger context with distinct responsibilities towards society at large. One of those responsibilities is to ensure equality, to guarantee that Human rights and Women rights are respected, and by doing so mobilize the competencies that women have to offer to leadership of our institutions and our society.

The 1st challenge we face is this combination of traditional university values with social values, to give us the possibility to intervene in society through:

• Education: University education has to be, essentially, the acquiring of a self-learning capacity based and supported by a high quality scientific foundation. University graduates have to be able to learn, and to unlearn in order to learn again, continuously.
• Research and development of methodologies that strengthen the values of justice, respect for the differences, ethics in society.

At the same time it requires that we open our campus and our hearts to society, so that they became our inspiration and an integral part of our knowledge system. It requires that we belong to society as agents and object of change.

Dear Participants,

We can say that we are living through a very interesting period, with organizations at continental and regional level promoting the development of partnerships and reforms in order to build a common vision and strengthen synergies for our development. We are also living in a period that the global market is getting more and more important and that African countries are showing a more positive growth. Unfortunately, we also live in a time where social conflicts are a hard reality.

In this highly dynamic political, social and economic context, our Higher Education Institutions face their second challenge: they have to revisit their mission statements, organizational frameworks and policies. They have to take specific measures to remain pertinent, relevant and competitive in a world where the provision of higher education is also increasingly globalised.

If our African universities understand well their role in our societies and if they read correctly the changes at the local and global level, they need to add to their gender policies a recognition that these policies should be based on the believe that the only way to bring to the Academia competencies that are crucial to address the challenges we face is to guarantee gender parity and that is why the Protocol on to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa recognizes, rightfully, the crucial role of women in the preservation of African values based on the principles of equality, peace, freedom, dignity, justice, solidarity and democracy.

Higher education is also facing new pressures like the Increasing demand for higher education, the Inequalities in access, the need to align higher education activities with development plans, the

rapid changes in technology and the changing labour markets, the integration in the national innovation system, HE and WTO/GATS and the creation of system regulatory mechanisms. These pressures can be also better faced from a wider range of competencies brought by all of academia.

Dear Participants

Africa Higher Education has moved ahead, even when they face the challenges and pressure mentioned. I truly believe that against all odds, weak economies, conflicts, epidemics and natural disasters, the African Higher Education systems are alive and growing.

But the important question of today is: How are the African universities dealing with this?

Today in Africa, we assist a revitalization process of our HE systems. This process has been based, in most cases, in strategic planning that brings alternative solutions to questions related to expansion and equitable access, HIV/AIDS prevention programs, improvement of quality and relevance of the programs, management of the human, physical and financial resources, the access of scientific information and the strengthening of research programs and dissemination of knowledge.

However, I feel that we have not tackled fully our first two challenges. We are still too attached to university values and forgot that cultural identity, openness, participation, anticipation and imagination, are fundamental for the fulfillment of our mission in society as HE institutions.

We did strategy planning, defined visions and missions, but we still measure our success only in terms of numbers: number of programs, numbers of graduates, numbers of scientific papers and so on.

Numbers are important, but they are not enough! They tell only a small part of the story! In order to align our vision and mission with the development needs of society we have to be part of society, sharing dreams and acting together to fulfill them. We need to share values and behaviors, we need to care for the less privileged and we need to fight for what is right.

Clearly, we have responded to pressures but we have not addressed our two main challenges! We have been unable to change our institutional culture to adapt to these challenges!

What occurs to me is questioning if we have the right leadership skills to do so; If we need to re-think our definition of leadership, since today that definition is based on the male stereotype?

The fact is that we are not inclusive and that although female students and female HE graduates have increased in numbers we still have very low participation of women in leadership both in academics and senior management at our institutions. This is a sign that, no, we do not have all the leadership skills that we need to fulfill our mission and change our culture.

Today we need leaders that can understand and act in a way that strengths our cultures and building our identity. We need leaders that understand and believe that participation is crucial to build ownership and commitment towards sustainable development.

We need leaders that are open, able to deal with several models and tasks, by understanding that they are interlinked and interdependent and that we need bridges to pursue and fulfill our vision.

We need wise leaders that believe that development is people-centered and inclusive, that feel passionate about what they do and have the courage to act even in difficult times. We need intuitive leaders, visionary leaders that understand the power of networks, leaders that get inspired by the action of others and finally are able to use the social energy that exists in any society to implement the changes needed.

What I would like to argue is that by not creating an enabling environment for female leadership in our institutions we are missing at least 50% the skills we need in Higher Education. We are missing those skills that will allow us to face the today’s challenges and gain the right to shape the future.

For HE institutions, the creation of opportunities for female leaders is not only a question of ethics and justice, it is also survival. Women leaders bring change through inclusion, participation, networking and ability to think and act in different levels and areas. They bring intuition and a holistic approach to our interventions.

Therefore, as Higher education institutions, we have to build the enabling environment for an inclusive leadership; we need to have the courage to develop an institutional culture conducive to women participation.

This implies that the following principles need to be followed:

• Follow Article 2 of the protocol and integrate a gender perspective in you policy decisions, legislation, development plans, programmes and activities; we train and educate the future generation of citizens and leaders so we have to make sure that they are gender sensitive, that they can lead this social transformation. We will need to look at our curricula, programs and activities to ensure that we are, indeed, contributing actively, to the transformation of society.

• Reward creativity and thinking “out of the box”;
• Promote networks that mobilize social energy, that uses intuition and open spaces for potential leaders;
• Redefine the requirements for career advancement by including also skills related to  socialization, participation and inclusion;
• Develop capacity development programs that strengthen the potential leadership characteristics of female staff;
• Develop an environment that allows women to interconnect their family life with their professional life. We have to do both to be happy and to be able to express our leadership characteristics.
• In effect we need to reinvent leadership in our institutions; we need to define leadership in a broader terms without stereotypes, bringing diversity, ingenuity and complementarily to our leadership, so that women and men leaders can be more attuned to society and their needs, building bridges of comprehension between our social lives and our professional lives. If we do that in Higher Education then we can influence also how our society chooses our leaders. We will start that social transform that will take us to a sustainable path.

Finally, allow me to speak from the bottom of my heart, to my female colleagues here present:

We need to get involved, to fight for what we believe is right, for our rights and the rights of others, we need to choose well our leaders women or men. We have to make our voices louder and our faces more visible because it matters, not only to us but to the rest of society.

We have great African Women Leaders: Mamphela Ramphele here present, Graça Machel, Miriam Makeba, Wangari Maathai, Ruth First, Gertrude Mongella. Ellen-Johnson Sirleaf, many others here present today, but not enough! We need tens of thousands, we need millions of women leaders for this social transformation.

Today, I am here in front of you, and what can say to you from my experience is the following:

• Feel passionate about what you do, fall in love, 1st. 2nd and as many times you needed.
• Dream, dream as far as you can, when your reach your dream, start all over again and dream new dreams. They will feed your soul and give propose to your life;
• Act, even when you are scared and afraid, act based in the values that define you as a person, based in the ethics that you have as a professional, act based in the political vision you have, so that at the end of the day you can be truly an agent of change;  

Eleanor Roosevelt said” We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot”.

• Build up your networks, share with others what you do, find support in them. Look for new ideas, be innovative in your everyday life;
• Promote female colleagues, get together to support each other as you face new challenges, amplify your voices and multiply your faces, we are at least 50% of human kind! We need to be present and we need to give the confidence to younger women that we can indeed help to shape our world.
• Be you, be proud and confident that the paths ahead are all yours, as you make your choice to fulfil the dream that is ours.

Dear colleagues,
Many men share also with us many of these skills that make us special, and they bring others that we may not have. So we need to engage them too, permanently and with conviction. Our common future is in our hands. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s work together for a sustainable future of our societies, of our Africa.
Thank you very much for your attention.